Spark - less

Some days it just feels gone.  Snuffed. I used to feel like I had this spark inside me.  More of a nice, bright, cheery flame really.  I could feel it and I always felt good.  Me.  True.  Even when I knew I didn't look good, I still felt good about myself, and the truth is I usually saw that reflected in those around me.  I could smile and get smiles back.  I could walk and get looked at.  I was noticeable.  I don't say that out of pride so much as an awareness that when you feel good about yourself, others will too.  Almost like bluffing.  In crappy sweats or hat-head days, I still felt it.

But these days, it mostly feels like a tiny almost insignificant wisp.  Barely a spar.  Surely not a flame anymore.  Where did it go?  Where did I lose it?  I feel like I did back in Montana, when I spent so much time struggling upstream.  But why here?  Why now?  My life bears so little resemblance to those days.  Glen, my children.  So much very much to be thankful for.  That I am actively thankful for all the time.  But for myself?  Somewhere I lost myself, or at least part of myself.  Spark, poof.

Part of it I think is the fact that I find I am constantly struggling these days with my oldest, and with a sense that I am not doing enough for her or for my own friends.  For the last year I have sortof let them get a bit farther away I guess, and I have not so much been there for them, and now I find myself waking at night to these terrible feelings of guilt, and yet a sense of helplessness in myself that I cannot call them now.  It is by no means too late, and yet I don't pick up the phone.  Why?

And the people here.  Some mornings I feel like I would be so happy to pick up here and move, move to where no one knows me, where we could start fresh.  The truth is, the Jewish moms here have undermined something.  It's not their fault.  They are hardly trying to be this way or to hurt me.  But somehow I find their community intimidating and cold and I am so on the outside.  I guess this would not so much bother me except for the fact that Emma is so different than me, and she seems constantly to be longing to be in the midst of her friends and society, and yet I am not and I don't know how to get her there.  We are not part of this group.  We are glaringly some days not part.  I push myself to try and make inroads.  I have started trying for playdates.  So far three have accepted, but still no one comes back to invite her back.  Is it her?  Is it me?  I fall asleep wondering and wake up wondering and I ache for her and for my inability.  My failure.  I know that's not the right word, but it feels that way.  My failure.  Over and over.  My failure.

I don't look like them.  I don't want to be like them.  I cringe at dressing like them.  I may never wear north face or uggs again.  But I want so badly for my daughter to feel like she fits in.  Where is my true to myself?  I have lost the center of it.  And with it, my spark.